“When I bite?”
“When you take them in your mouth. Do you feel anything hard?”
“I spit it out.”
“Someday I’m going to find something.”
“Well,” he said, “you’ll be catching it early.”
“I spotted again. It wasn’t much. A little pink on the toilet paper.”
Louise got out of bed and put on her house slippers. She smiled and raised the nightshirt. She pulled it over her head. She drew the shades and turned on all the lights, even the one in the closet.
“I have to tell you something,” George Mills said.
Television had taught him. Edward R. Murrow had shown him their living rooms and studies, the long, set-tabled dining rooms of the famous. Commercials had given him an idea of the all-electric kitchens of the median-incomed, the tile-floor-and-microwave-oven-blessed, their digital-fired radios waking them to music. He knew the lawns of the middle class, their power mowers leaning like sporting goods against their cyclone fences, their chemical logs like delivered newspapers, their upright mailboxes like tin bread.
“I used to want,” he’d told Laglichio’s driver, “to live in a tract house and hear airplanes over my head. I wanted hammocks between my trees and a pool you assemble like a toy.”
They had four hundred dollars in savings.
“I’m poor,” he’d said. “In a couple of years I’ll have my silver wedding anniversary. I’m white as a president and poor as a stone.”
“They give to the niggers.”
“Nah,” he’d said, “the niggers got less than I got. I’m just poor. You’re a kid, you’re still young, you’ll be in the teamsters one day. You know what it means to be poor in this country? I take it personally. I’ve been poor all my life. I’ve always been poor and so have my people — Millses go back to the First Crusade — and I don’t understand being poor. We’ve always been respectable and always been poor. Like some disease only Jews get, or women in mountainous country.”
“You got a car. You got a house.”
“A ’63 Buick Special. A bungalow.”
He worked for Laglichio, carrying the furniture and possessions of the evicted.
Usually they had no place to go. Laglichio had a warehouse. The furniture was taken there. Laglichio charged eight dollars a day for storage. Anything not called for in sixty days was Laglichio’s to dispose of. It turned up in resale shops, was sold off for junk or in lots at “estate” sales. The newer stuff, appliances, stereos, the TV’s, went into hock. Laglichio had a contract with the city. He got a hundred and fifty dollars for each move, half of which was paid by a municipal agency, half by the evicted tenant. Laglichio demanded payment up front. It was rare that a tenant had the cash, and Laglichio refused to put anything into his truck until the owner signed a release assigning his property to Laglichio should he be unable to repay all of Laglichio’s claims against him — the seventy-five dollars he owed for the move, the eight-dollar-a-day storage fee — after the sixty-day grace period. He worked with sheriff’s deputies. He had the protection of the police at each eviction. He paid Mills one hundred and eighty dollars a week.
“You’re free to make a new start now,” Mills might explain to one of these dispossessed folks. “Look at it that way.” Sometimes he would be sitting outlandishly on the very sofa he had just carried down into the street when he said this.
“New start? To do which? Sleep in the street?”
“Nah,” he’d say. “Without all this — this hardware.” He indicated the intermingled rooms of furniture exposed on the pavement, a kitchen range beside a bed, a recliner in front of an open refrigerator, tall standing lamps next to nightstands or potted in washtubs.
“Shit.”
“I mean it. Footloose. Fancy-free. Not tied down by possessions.” He did mean it. He hated his own things, their chintz and walnut weight. But of course he understood their tears and arguments and nodded amiably when they disagreed. “I’m Laglichio’s nice guy,” he’d confide. “I understand. I’m poor myself. I’m Laglichio’s public relations.”
“Get your ass out my sofa.”
“But legally, you see, it isn’t your sofa. It’s Laglichio’s sofa till you pay him for moving it for you out into the street. But it’s okay. I’ll get up. Don’t get sore.”
“Is there some trouble here?”
“No, deputy. Don’t bother yourself. The lady’s a little upset’s all there’s to it.” And he might wink, sometimes at the cop, sometimes at the woman.
“How this happen?” the woman cried. “How this come to be?”
“Poor folks,” Mills said philosophically.
“What you talkin’ poor folks, white folks?”
“Oh no,” he’d say courteously, interested as always in the mystery, the special oddness of his life. “You must understand. It’s difficult to fail in America.”
“Yeah? I never had no trouble. None my people ever found it so tough. Look at Rodney. He be young. He be my youngest. All this exciting to him. He think he gonna live and play outside here on the pavement an’ I never have to call him. Why, this be sweet to Rodney. Ignorant. Ignorant and dreamful. But soon’s he get his size it don’t be no hardship to fail.”
“My people do awful things to your people, but even so it’s hard, it’s hard to fail. Simple animal patience will take you immense distances. Bag in the National, horse the carts in the parking lot. Make stock boy. In a couple of years you’ll trim lettuce, in a couple more you’ll be doing the produce like flower arrangements. No no, lady. Success is downhill all the way. You put in your time, you wait your turn. Not me, not any Mills ever. A thousand years of stall and standstill passed on like a baton.”
“How this cost me money?”
“No no. Nothing I say costs people money.”
Laglichio appeared in the doorway and signaled Mills toward him.
“Did she sign?”
“No.”
“Then what were you shooting the shit about? Here, give me the papers.” Laglichio returned with the executed forms. “I told her the papers proved it was her furniture. That’s all you got to say. How many times do I have to tell you?”
“Sure,” Mills said.
“You know something, George?” Laglichio said. “You ain’t strong. You don’t lift high. You’re what now? Fifty? Fifty something? You ain’t got the muscle for this. What am I going to do with you, George? You ain’t got the beef for this business. And any white man who can’t get a nigger to sign a binding legal paper probably ain’t got the brains for it neither. Put the shit in the truck and let’s get out of here.”
He wasn’t strong. At best he was a student of leverage, knowledgeable about angles, overhangs, the sharp switchbacks in stairways. He was very efficient, scholarly as a geologist about floor plans, layouts, seeing them in his head, someone with an actual gift for anticipating and defying tight squeezes, lubricant as a harbor pilot. Not mechanically inclined but centrifugally, centripetally, careful as a cripple. And the furniture of the poor was light, something inflated and cut corner about it that reduced weight and turned it to size. He wore the quilted protective pads of long-distance furniture removers and affected their wide leather belts and heavy work shoes and gave the impression, his body robed in its gray green upholstery, of someone dressed in mats, drop cloth. He thought he looked rather like a horse.
Laglichio would not fire him. Mills was not union. Often laid off but rarely fired, he was a worker in trades that jerked to the whims of the economy, a stumbling Dow-Jones of a man. It was this that had brought him to Laglichio in the first place. He worked in unemployment-related industries.